Alice Walton Gained $33 Billion in a Year While Building a Free Medical School

Alice Walton added $33 billion to her fortune between March 2025 and March 2026, according to Forbes, without holding an executive job or a board seat at Walmart. Her net worth now stands at nearly $120 billion.

Walton, 76, is the youngest child of Walmart founder Sam Walton. Her brothers also hold significant stakes in the retailer and have taken roles in its governance; she has not. She came by her wealth through inheritance and passive holdings, and when Walmart stock climbs, so does her net worth.

The mechanics are straightforward. Walton co-manages Walton Enterprises, one of the two family holding companies that control an estimated 39%-44% of Walmart, the No. 2 Fortune 500 company — a rank it lost only this year to Amazon. Walmart's 2026 proxy statement shows Walton Enterprises holds about 3 billion shares directly and votes another 513 million held by the Walton Family Holdings Trust. Walton's direct personal stake is far smaller: an estimated 20 million shares in her own name, worth roughly $2.2 billion at current prices. The bulk of her position sits inside the family entities.

Walton is not a stranger to work. After graduating from Trinity University in 1971, she spent a short stint as a children's clothing buyer at Walmart before moving into finance, first as a stockbroker at E.F. Hutton. She later ran investment operations at Arvest, the family's bank. In 1988 she launched her own investment bank, Llama Co., which folded after the 1998 bond market crash, according to Bloomberg.

From retail inheritance to medical education

These days her main focus is medicine and philanthropy. In 2021 she founded the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine in Bentonville, Ark. — her hometown and Walmart's headquarters — and donated $250 million to fund it. The school offers a four-year, degree-granting medical program, opened in 2025 and welcomed its first class of 48 students.

The school is waiving tuition for its first five cohorts, though students still cover fees and living costs. This fall it added a second cohort, bringing enrollment to 96.

Walton has framed the school as a corrective to how American doctors are trained and paid. "The real problem with health care is that there's no incentive in the payment system for doctors to spend time helping you learn what good nutrition is, how important exercise is," she told PBS NewsHour earlier this year. "And, frankly, doctors aren't taught those things because they're not paid for those things."

She has described her approach as fusing art with medicine. "I like the collision," she said.

Walton is not the only billionaire bankrolling free medical education. Ruth Gottesman gave $1 billion in 2024 to make tuition free at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and Michael Bloomberg's philanthropy put up $1 billion to cover tuition for most Johns Hopkins medical students. The difference: those gifts went to established schools. Walton built her own.

A $350 million hospital bet

The medical school was only the start. On Sept. 17, the Alice L. Walton Foundation broke ground on a Bentonville health campus built with the Mercy health system and Cleveland Clinic. Her foundation is committing $350 million toward a 250-bed hospital and a cancer center. The campus's first building, a specialty care center focused on cardiac services, is slated to open in 2029.

"I see innovation, technology, and research coming together to improve lives and address the critical issue of providing access for rural communities throughout the state and the region," Walton said at the groundbreaking, according to Axios.

With her stake in Walmart still compounding and her giving now concentrated on a single region's health infrastructure, Walton has effectively converted a passive inheritance into an active, billion-dollar build-out of medical institutions in northwest Arkansas.